Messages

46

Quake / Re: Last ditch hair brain idea

« on: July 13, 2021, 10:04:00 AM »

The entire server is a 12-core Intel CPU machine with 64GB ram and a 1TB disk.
It's about 81% full. It's a full, bare metal dedicated server and they're pricy.

I have backed up the quake2 content which is about the only content I can access outside of my shell to a backup server with the help of Claire. Total content was about 9.8GB but total size was 17.3GB so even within that quake2 folder there was inaccessible content. We're working on the backup issues from inside the server now.

I recommend someone with abundant storage capacity try using wget to download all the web content.
There are a lot of folders that are op-critical that nobody has access to at the moment.

It's an expensive server. Not your usual $24.95/month web presence.

If people have $20 to spend on a lottery ticket every month on the snowballs-chance of a win then they can afford to pay that $20 to directly supporting the server. A lottery win would produce more problems than it solves, like who's going to keep and manage the money that "the users" won?

For the time being we need to stand by and formulate a plan and let the family grieve. After a month or two we can approach the widow about transfer of ownership but there are certain files on Quadz' PC that we need for root access unless another method is found. For the time being I intend to respect the property rights of his family.

47

Trouble Shooting / Re: Trying to access my old forum account

« on: July 12, 2021, 09:56:19 AM »

The profile definitely exists but that ^ in the name might be making it invalid on the login name filter.

http://forum.tastyspleen.net/quake/index.php?action=profile;u=217

48

Trouble Shooting / Re: Trying to access my old forum account

« on: July 12, 2021, 07:11:55 AM »

If you still have access to and can remember your email address you used to create the account you might try  to recover/change your password. I don't know any other way unless there is a forums admin who can force a password reset or change it for you.

Attachments and other options is the method for inserting a picture.

49

Quake / Re: Quadz, the Loquaciously Multiloquent Member

« on: July 12, 2021, 07:08:20 AM »

My condolences to his family.
I am still reeling from this news. Tastyspleen has been the nucleus of the Q2 community and Quadz was the nuclear force that kept it together. Wallfly was an important part of that. I never met quadz but we collaborated on some things and he was always helpful. One never thinks of mortality and when it hits it's always unexpected.

50

Trouble Shooting / Re: Q2pro = spyware?

« on: July 11, 2021, 06:16:52 PM »

There's no automatic update or update tool for q2pro. You have to explicitly go to the web site and download the latest build.

51

Trouble Shooting / Re: Q2pro = spyware?

« on: July 10, 2021, 09:59:02 PM »

FUD.
If data is encrypted then one can't say anything about the contents of the data.
"Discloses IP address." Well, yeah, that's kind of built into the protocol, isn't it?
"Base-64 or Hex." Duh, those are encoding techniques, not encryption techniques.
I'm uncertain about the grammar in this context, is he saying it uses both or that base-64 is interchangeable with hex? Wireshark displays bytes as hex. Also ASCII.
"It phones home." What IP address is home?
Q2PRO and all the advanced clients now talk to q2servers.com for the list of active servers.
They also immediately send status requests to each of the available servers to get ping estimates and the status blocks of the servers.
On Anticheat enabled servers the clients send certain data to the server about the hashes of the game files per a list supplied by that particular server. They don't send file lists. It's the same for R1Q2. Was this checking performed on such a server?

52

Trouble Shooting / Re: Bandwidth

« on: May 31, 2021, 01:00:02 PM »

With wireless the primary cause of jitter is co-channel interference on the WiFi link. Your kids video streams compete for the right to transmit and receive. The contention can cause dropped frames and lag of real-time streams like the Q2 protocol. The same thing applies to the radio channel connecting your tether device to the WAN, LTE, 5G etc., all suffer from the same problem. Geography also matters. Larger cells suffer from more traffic and contention. Your gaming life will suck for a while but it won't be because of texture detail.

Yeah, I thought that seemed kinda whacked about textures and bandwidth.  I think losing the gun model, footsteps, and even gibs (q2pro) saves a bit but at 20 kbps t'aint gonna matter. My connection's been okay, faster than my wired one in fact, but there are moments or hiccups every so often. The problem is after 15 gb of data, they kick it down to 2 Mbps till the next cycle. Anyhow, t'will just be me on this tether, kids are gone now (for now) - guess I am dating myself here...heehee. And if it doesn't suck so bad I may just stay wireless after summer is over. Again, thanks for the replies.

Cheers,

That 20kbps is only the server-client protocol needed for tracking the player movement and actions. Those are the frames that the server sends to tell the client what's happening inside the map and for the client to send your player movement, line of sight and shots. Graphic objects, maps and sounds are not sent except at client connect or intermissions. Those downloads can be from the server or from the http redirect servers. They consume more bandwidth and go much faster than 20kbps (That's 20 kilobits per second, not bytes) Quake 2 protocol was very economical because it was invented when modems were the dominant life-form on the planet.

The client is presenting you with a view of the map based on your client information and a bunch of numbers from the server. The server communicates the positions and movements of the other players but there is no concern about content like sounds and graphics, those are all computed internally in your client. The view you see and hear all comes from the client code and the maps and models on your disk, nothing like that flows between client and server while the game is played.

20kbps is an average rate, assuming you already have all the entities, maps, skins and sounds on your client. If you are already an established player then downloads will be rare and your gaming bandwidth consumption will be minimal. At an average of 20kbps it will take you 7,500,000 seconds to transfer 15GB of data (1.5x10^11 bits of data / 20,000 bits per second). That's 2083 hours of playing. If you're hitting the 15GB limit it's not from playing Quake 2.

53

/dev/random / Re: UFO SPACECRAFT CONFIRMED BY USA

« on: May 31, 2021, 12:36:00 PM »

It was not my intent to address pilot observations. Only the radar tracking and the physics of radar.

54

Trouble Shooting / Re: Bandwidth

« on: May 29, 2021, 06:09:07 PM »

With wireless the primary cause of jitter is co-channel interference on the WiFi link. Your kids video streams compete for the right to transmit and receive. The contention can cause dropped frames and lag of real-time streams like the Q2 protocol. The same thing applies to the radio channel connecting your tether device to the WAN, LTE, 5G etc., all suffer from the same problem. Geography also matters. Larger cells suffer from more traffic and contention. Your gaming life will suck for a while but it won't be because of texture detail.

55

/dev/random / Re: UFO SPACECRAFT CONFIRMED BY USA

« on: May 29, 2021, 05:53:59 PM »

There are lots of reasons a target can fall off radar. This is why transponders and IFF exist. To enhance the availability of target signals.
A small target, especially something like a drone is nearly invisible to some radars. The familiar circular radar being displayed is called a search radar and the antenna is the familiar rotating one that sweeps 360°. This is typically UHF and has a wavelength of 70cm, a target smaller than that cannot be easily detected, or once detected, it cannot be maintained. Targets these days are not dots of glowing phosphors, fading until the next refresh but they are icons on digital displays based on a computer database created by a range-rate gating system that attempts to pick returns and predict their angular position and range from one scan to the next. If a target moves quickly enough or "jinks" out of the range gate it can disappear until the next scan and the time interval is a function of the rotation of the antenna, which, for aircraft control radar is about 12 seconds. At higher frequencies like C, X or Ku bands, there is the phenomenon of tropospheric bending which can bend the beam downward and cause it to see far targets that would normally be over-the-horizon. This bending and refracting can also make false targets and clutter that can appear to speed off in strange and wonderful ways. A radar operator cannot conclude too much about a target, which is why CAP is sent out to put eyes on a target unless that target is on a bee line toward the ship. In that case CIWS is engaged that has a targeting radar that sends out a conical raster on a narrower beam at very high PRF that can profile, range and keep the target illuminated continuously until it is identified as friendly or terminated.

56

Trouble Shooting / Re: Bandwidth

« on: May 28, 2021, 09:35:14 PM »

If you already have the textures then they don't consume any bandwidth. The video display doesn't consume any network bandwidth at all.
The bandwidth you use gaming depends on the game and the mod, Quake2 for instance consumes about 20kbps per client. Hardly anything by today's standards.
The only time you will consume significant bandwidth is while downloading maps (the biggest files in Q2), textures and sounds.

57

Quake / Re: How to change weapon damage/rate-of-fire in Quake 2 console/config?

« on: May 08, 2021, 05:46:11 AM »

The number of errors you get in Visual Studio builds depends on the age of the mod and whether you are getting the old sources or something more recent. The original idSoftware code was written for an older version of C and upgrading that code in VS2019 isn't trivial. It also doesn't help when VS wants to bitch about "unsafe" functions and does so by throwing an error instead of just a warning. Look around on GitHub if you're interested in pursuing mod source code as there is lots of good work being done there that might save you some time.

Extracting from older source zips and expecting to build in VS is not going to work very often.

Yes Visual Studios likely isn't ideal for older source code come to think of it, I was hoping for some shortcuts but something as specific as "changing weapon attributes in Quake 2 (24 year old game) with C/C++"  isn't going to yield much with a search engine. Oh well. I'll swing around GitHub at some point to see if some of the work's been done.

Visual Studio 2019 is perfectly capable of converting the VC++ 6.0 projects to Visual Studio 2019 format. In fact, it's better at upgrading them than VS2008 or 2010 ever was. It's just that the libraries have evolved and you'll initially get a lot of warnings and errors until you tailor the projects to suit the new environment. Most of the settings are trivial but there are a few things that prior experience can help with, especially the whining in the compiler about "unsafe" functions but it does explain itself.

58

Quake / Re: How to change weapon damage/rate-of-fire in Quake 2 console/config?

« on: May 06, 2021, 06:18:53 PM »

The number of errors you get in Visual Studio builds depends on the age of the mod and whether you are getting the old sources or something more recent. The original idSoftware code was written for an older version of C and upgrading that code in VS2019 isn't trivial. It also doesn't help when VS wants to bitch about "unsafe" functions and does so by throwing an error instead of just a warning. Look around on GitHub if you're interested in pursuing mod source code as there is lots of good work being done there that might save you some time.

Extracting from older source zips and expecting to build in VS is not going to work very often.

59

Quake / Re: How to change weapon damage/rate-of-fire in Quake 2 console/config?

« on: May 05, 2021, 09:22:03 PM »

The weapon classes and their fire rates are controlled by the game code, so yes, you'd have to mod the source and recompile.

60

/dev/random / Re: Hot bitches

« on: April 25, 2021, 06:46:34 PM »

I thought you were bullshitting, but... WOW. REALLY? What kinda asshole...

Pingel said he was notified Sunday evening by Roberts' partner, Lance O'Brien, that Roberts had died.

In a phone call Monday evening, O'Brien told CNN he was distraught after saying goodbye to Roberts at her bedside and left Cedars-Sinai Medical Center believing it would be the last time he saw her.

Your "wife", the other half of YOU, is dying in the hospital, and you LEAVE??? Are you shitting me? Ya know, your grandma, maybe even your ma is dying in the hospital, maybe you run home for a shower after a few days of not going anywhere, sleeping in the same clothes, and then you come right back. But if your WIFE is dying, and you think she won't survive until morning... you don't leave.

What the fuck, man?

After I a little more looking around...

https://celebrity.nine.com.au/latest/tanya-roberts-still-alive-partner-lance-obrien-mid-interview/18fe70dc-968d-4fc1-91fc-a0cd74eb01be

He gets a call WHILE BEING INTERVIEWED BY INSIDE EDITION...


I smell something. You smell it?

COVID rules at the time forbade visitors but because she was terminal he was permitted to visit. The hospital expelled him after whatever interval they allowed him at the time but she didn't pass at that time. They invited him back later for the removal of life support. She passed away from sepsis due to UTI. She was susceptible organ failure due to a prior hepatitis C infection. Liver impairment leads to generalized organ failure.